characters ,bmp,png,jpg ?

[Candle]

What do you find best to work with when you do your sprites ?
Do you start at  one size then size it down or  start at the size you want and just make it big to work on .

Any help would be cool  . All new to me ..

[Phemar]

You work on it at the size the sprite will be in your game, and just zoom in.

bmp,png,jpg ?

bmp when you import into ags, gif/png for posting on forums.

Hope it helps!

[Candle]

Yep it helps .. anything you can learn helps ..

[Nacho]

I usually work in a rough pencil design... then I cut in and paste it into a  scree with the size that the game's gonna have and scale it to the size that fits in the background... I cut the sprite again and start to work in another layer in the definitive pixel art...

The format does not matter if you're not going to upload, except if you save in JPG or GIFS, which can spoil the sprite when saving. I personally use PSP's files, but BMP, PCX and PNG and TFF does not spoil the image when saving.

Maybe I am wrong, but I thinki that just the tff (And PS and PSP files, of course) keeps the layers when saving ... Anyone can enlight me?

P.D. PSP is Pain shop Pro and PS is photoshop.

[Bryan]

Maybe I am wrong, but I thinki that just the tff (And PS and PSP files, of course) keeps the layers when saving ... Anyone can enlight me?

GIF saves layers too.

So far I've just drawn at the final size / resolution (zoomed way in of course).  For tiny objects that I had trouble drawing for a 320x240 game I did try drawing at a higher resolution and scaling it down, but I didn't like the results.  YMMV

I find layers essential, so I only actually export bmp (or pcx) to a temp file for slurping into AGS.

PS I've only actually drawn about half a dozen sprites and 2 backgrounds so far... so what do I know :)

[Candle]

Thank you guys for your suggestions .. and help

[MrColossal]

GIF saves layers too.

not really, if you have a GIF animation and open it in imageready it will display the frames as layers but it won't save layers like a .psd file will

[Nacho]

Making the backgrounds in a double size, a little bit roughly and then reduce it to its half size helps to make some kind of antialiasing, test it...

[Kweepa]

Here's a character I did a couple of days ago next to the "sketch".



I wanted a swedish look so I scaled down a picture of Max von Sydow as a head reference.
The nice thing about Photoshop's scaling feature is that when you zoom in you can move the scaled image around sub-pixel and get different features popping out of the resampling. Obviously I wanted to see the eyes, nose and mouth...

Cheers,
Steve

[RickJ]

Candle,

Most folks use a drawing prgram that supports layers and keep their original sopurce drawings in the native format of that drawing.   I disagree with the use of BMPs for AGS import because theyare excessively large.   The abilty to import PNG files has recently been added to AGS and I find these files to be much more compact and of relatively high quality.   PNG files have the added advantage in that they are also web viewable.  JPG files are notorious for a degrading image quality and most people don't use them.

There are a lot of opinions about what size to make character sprites.  I normally  establish a pixel scaling and use that for every character in a game.  In one of my current projects I am using a pixel scaling of 20 pixels/foot.  So a character that is supposed to be 6 ft tall would have a sprite that is  120 pixels tall.   This way any characters I make for the game may appear with eachother in any scene.   I am using this for a game resolution of 320x200.   The character size ends up being just about right for a scene depicting an inside room such as an office or bedroom.  For other scenes (i.e. outdoors) the character is scaled down using AGS's walkable area scaling.   I know other people do things a bit differently and I guess there is no right or wrong way.  This is just what works for me.  

[Kweepa]

I disagree with the use of BMPs for AGS import because theyare excessively large.   The abilty to import PNG files has recently been added to AGS and I find these files to be much more compact and of relatively high quality.

For a couple of hundred smallish bitmaps, I don't think most people will be hurting for disk space. BMPs have the advantage that they are loaded and saved natively by all paint packages I know.
As for PNGs, they are lossless, so they should be high quality!

PNG files have the added advantage in that they are also web viewable.

That's true. And you can preview them in Windows.
It's horses for courses!

[Candle]

Thank you for your insite , I was wondering about png's and how they would look so maybe all try that on the next one .
I just wish i would of got the talent my brother got for drawing , but no I had to get the good looks .. lol

[Gilbert]

I disagree with the use of BMPs for AGS import because theyare excessively large.

Well, the size is the same after import, so there're no problem using BMP as import unless you're low on disk space for storing the working files.

[mätzyboy]

Steve: I'm so curious about that swedish guy, myself being swedish and all. What's he going to be used for? Seems like a sweet character

[ravenfusion]

^ Steve's doing a game, it uses non-shaded characters so I guess it's for the game.

Anyways, as for the format I use... I use PNG. It's simply the easiest to use, same quality as BMP except alot smaller.

[Gfunkera]

why does AGS not support gif. filetypes? Wouldnt it be logical, definatley would make me happy gif. can compress so much better than any IMO

[Gilbert]

Because it DID support GIF, only was that it was removed.

The reason was that the GIF decoder used was quite buggy, which could crash the editor or generate other strange effects, so the easiest way to fix it was to remove it. As I mentioned before, no matter what file format you use for import, the game file size will be the same, so there're no point to waste time to re-implement it.

Of course, it would be cool if the editor supports animated gif import which would be an easy way for multiple sprite importing. But I think because of the patent (I think it's expired now or soon to be expired in most part of the world) on LZW compression and CJ probably took his time for more important featurs (and work and life!) so nothing was done on it yet.

[MrColossal]

that's something i was going to ask about, if it would be possible to import from animated gifs and have them be individual sprites that are imported

wouldn't have to always make a sprite sheet

but again, not that big of an issue

[Kweepa]

mätzyboy,
The swedish guy is a character in
http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=8;action=display;threadid=12835

He's been in Mexico for a few years - that's why he's not pale skinned.

It would be nice to import animated gifs directly into a view - could even keep the timing from the gif!

[TerranRich]

AGS supports multiple sprite importing, doesn't it? It has to... I'm using it for By the Sword now. I think that's good enough.

I save everything as BMP, only because PNG support wasn't available at the time. But now that it is, I've re-done my characters to be anti-aliased and have alpha channels built in, thanks to Poser. So it's BMP for me.

Oh, and TIFF files do indeed save the layers; it has been thought that TIFF might dominate PSD files if Adobe doesn't do something to make it special. And JPEG compression is horrible. Don't use it if you want to have perfect images.